father

Daddy’s gone and he took my hope with him

~ KJ ~ 1 Comment

Fuck you, grief, and your shitty timing.

I finally managed to quiet the internal chaos sparked by my father’s death. There’s no longer any fear that the police are coming to get us, there’s no more thinking that we caused his death, and thankfully, no more asking to be with daddy in heaven (because that was hard for me on multiple levels). So all is good, right?

Wrong. I sat down the other day to write an article that was due the next morning, when I was suddenly overwhelmed with grief. I couldn’t stop crying. I tried to distract myself, but it would only work for a few minutes before I would start crying again. I was a mess. At the most random, inconvenient time, my mind decided it was time to grieve.

But why? I don’t miss my father. I hadn’t seen him in nearly a year, and for good reason. He was an asshole. A fucking asshole. I don’t care that some think it rude to speak ill of the dead. I am speaking the truth; a person’s life status does not affect that.

I brought up my emotional struggle to my therapist on Thursday. She assured me it was okay to grieve his death, but I was sure I wasn’t sad about his physical death at all. I was starting to get frustrated because I couldn’t figure out how to put my thoughts into words (another problem I will write about later). My therapist encouraged me to just say what was inside.

After a few more moments of frustration, I stomped my feet on the floor, and through tears, shouted, “I’ll never know why he did it. Maybe my mom made him do it, maybe he didn’t want to. Now I’ll never know because he’s dead.”

That was the loss I was grieving. Not the loss of my father, but the loss of the truth. The loss of knowing why. The loss of the hope that maybe, just maybe, my father loved me. Maybe he just hurt me because she made him do it. Maybe he really didn’t hate me. Maybe he was just doing her bidding because he had no other choice.

I will never know anything. That is why I cry. I want to believe that if my father was alive, he would be honest about his role in the abuse. In some way, I want to believe that knowing would make a difference, that it in some way would change something.

I know it doesn’t change anything.

But there is a part of me that has spent decades holding onto hope that my father loved me. A child needs someone to love them, and I knew from very early on that person was not my mother. So I put all of my hope in my father, even when his actions showed the opposite of love. I needed to hold on to that possibility. I needed that to survive my childhood.

But do I still need that hope now?

I am that little girl, and that little girl is me.

~ KJ ~ 10 Comments

When my therapist asked me last week to write a letter to my younger self, you would have thought she had just asked me to write a dissertation on behavioral neuroscience. It was the last thing I wanted to do. Actually, at that moment, I probably would have rather written that dissertation. Or stuck my head down the toilet. Or both. I didn’t want to write about feelings. I didn’t want to acknowledge any reasons for having any feelings. Blah.

But I knew I couldn’t get away with not writing it. My therapist and I have worked out an agreement so I could stay out of the hospital, and it requires that I participate fully in therapy. I waited until the night before our next session to write it, not expecting that it would turn into the letter that it did.

While I was writing it, I did get emotional. But it was a different kind of emotional. I felt genuine empathy for the child who experienced this pain. I felt the anger she felt. I felt sad for her. But there was a huge disconnect between me and this child. In my brain, we were two different people. I wasn’t yet connecting that we were one in the same.

My therapist asked if I would be comfortable sharing the letter with her in our session on Monday. At first, I was afraid. I didn’t think I did it right. I asked her if she was going to be mad if it was wrong. She explained that there wasn’t really a wrong way to do it, so I said it was okay. She asked if there was anything I needed first. Needs. What are those? For the first time, I did ask for something. I asked if she could sit next to me instead of across from me in her usual spot. It would make me feel less alone. And she obliged.

I started to read the letter. It had been the first time I read it all at once, and the first time I spoke it out loud. As I was reading it, I started to realize that this wasn’t another person. The words on this paper, these words I wrote to this little girl, those words were written for me.

I was the confused little girl who didn’t understand why mommy and daddy kept hurting her.

I was the little girl afraid of her own parents, with nowhere to hide because mommy blocked all the closets and underneath the beds.

I was the scared girl who thought everyone was just meant to hurt her.

I was the empty little girl who believed the only thing inside of her was evil.

I was the little girl who felt so alone, even when she was surrounded by people.

I was the little girl who felt invisible, who tried so desperately to get someone to help her, but no one listened, no one cared.

I was the little girl who tried to kill herself at six years old because she had lost any sense of hope of a life without pain.

I started to read the paragraph about feeling hurt. I felt the heaviness in my heart. As I read the words “I wish there was a Band-aid I could give you that could make your hurt go away”, I broke down entirely. It was like I found out someone I loved just died. I cried so hard I was blinded by my own tears. I needed comfort. I reached out to my therapist and she allowed me to hug her. She held me as I cried (and covered her in tears, drool and nasal discharge), until I calmed down enough that I could see again.

I took a few more minutes fighting through tears, trying to catch my breath so I could finish the letter. After a few failed attempts, I picked up where I left off, and finished reading. I even managed to laugh at the part where I wrote that “something was wrong with mommy and daddy and I guess they missed that memo.” Something was surely wrong with them to say the least, but I know that they shouldn’t need a memo to remind them that they were supposed to love their children.

My therapist encouraged me to keep reading the letter. She said that younger part of me needs to hear all of those things, and that I need to hear it as well.

And as I kept reading the letter, the more I realize that everything she went through was real. The more I realize that everything that happened wasn’t fair. The more I realize that something could have been done to stop the damage.

The more I read, the more I realize I am that little girl, and that little girl is me.

I’ve been such an emotional mess these past few days because of this. I saw it as a bad thing, but my therapist did not. For the first time, I am letting myself feel. After a year in therapy, I am finally feeling sad about my abuse. Apparently, that’s progress.

Emotionally Illiterate

~ KJ ~ 3 Comments

There is an enormous amount of learning that occurs in the first years of life. I’m not just talking about the usual: learning how to talk, learning how to feed, and learning how to the use the potty. I’m talking about the things that people don’t realize: how children learn emotions.

Infants emulate their parents, including facial expressions. As they grow, they learn to associate emotion words with their expressions, with the help of their caretakers. Toddlers learn to identity emotions, and children learn to regulate emotions in the early years of schooling.

But what happens when a child’s caretakers are emotionally empty?

An infant can’t emulate emotions she doesn’t see. A mother who is never happy or joyful cannot show her baby how to show happiness or joy. This hinders the development of emotional literacy. Children can learn about emotions in school, but when there is no emotional learning going on at home from an early age, the child misses out considerably, and the effects are long-lasting.

My mother was (and still is) a sociopath. She cannot express genuine emotion. She never has. The only emotion she ever expresses is anger. She is void of happiness (and a lot of other things, but we won’t go there right now). It is no surprise, then, that I grew up emotionally illiterate.

Of course, as a child, I didn’t know what emotional literacy was or what it entailed. I remember people defining their emotions: happy, sad, surprised, mad. I knew they were emotions, but I didn’t really comprehend anything beyond that. I never felt them, or at least understood that I felt them. I knew what anger was, because I experienced it through my mother and father regularly. And as a result of their anger, I knew fear like it was my best friend. The rest was a mystery.

My facial expression has been consistently “muted anger” since I was a child. Many people accused me of being angry, and I didn’t understand because I wasn’t feeling angry at all. But my natural facial expression was typically angry. Because that is the only facial expression I experienced as an infant. It’s the only facial expression I was able to emulate, and I carried that with me through life.

I learned quite a bit about emotions when I was around my peers in school. I finally started to identify feelings within myself, only to have them trampled upon by both of my parents.

I remember one time, I had an About Me project in elementary school. I chose to write with the marker colored bittersweet, because I said my life made me feel bitter. My mother became enraged when she heard, and I was punished severely. She told me I had no reason to feel bitter, and that I should be grateful for the life she was giving me. A 9(ish) year-old who identifies feeling bitter about life should be a red flag for anybody. But of course, my mother believed she did no wrong, so she just burned that flag to the ground.

Then there was the incident when I was a teenager. My high school guidance counselor called my parents, concerned that I was significantly depressed. I was. But feeling depressed was not allowed in our family. Feelings in general were not allowed. And I was punished severely for it. For years after that incident, I became emotionally constipated. I made myself numb to protect myself from my parents. I showed or felt no emotion because I did not want to experience the pain I felt that night ever again. The little bit of emotional knowledge I had was buried deep inside of me, never wanting to be dug up.

My issues are complex (!). First, I had a rough start in life being raised by a sociopath, so I spent a good portion of my childhood emotionally illiterate. Second, what little emotional knowledge I did have became muddled in my adolescence, and pushed down into the crevices of my semi-conscious mind.

So now, at the age of 30, I find myself needing to learn emotions all over again. And yes, sometimes I feel like a five year-old. I read children’s books on feelings. I have charts with emotion words and flashcards with feelings on them. My therapist draws faces depicting different emotions that I try to guess.

Whenever I correctly identify a feeling in myself, my therapist praises me like you would praise a small child. Because that’s what I need. Because I am so emotionally inept. I am an emotional illiterate.

But I’m learning what it means to have feelings again.

The Stones of What I’ve Lost

~ KJ ~ 10 Comments

I had group therapy today for my support group. It is something I look forward to every couple of months, even though the topics are somewhat difficult and I always end up crying at least once.

Today was no exception. I was actually doing quite well until the topics of anniversary dates and grief came up. I thought to myself, anniversary dates aren’t a problem for me. I’m over it.

But I decided to write down something anyway. April 25th. The day I tried to end my life by taking a more than lethal dose of aspirin. The day my family found out, and did nothing about it.

The memories flooded my mind and I couldn’t focus on anything else. I felt the pain again, the despair that was all too familiar. I tried to hold back my tears, and retreated back into myself. By the time the topic of grief came up, I was teetering in another place in my mind. I was back in 2008, reliving the pain of that day.

I was able to ground myself enough to work through the rest of the grief session. We each chose eight stones, and had to write something we lost on each one, something we grieved or are still grieving.

It didn’t take long for me to write my losses: Mother, father, family, purpose, self, love, hope, and support.


Simple words, that to the outside world, would never appear to be related to loss or grief. But they were, for me, the losses I still carry with me every day.

The loss of a mother, the mother I never had, the mother I always wanted, the mother I deserved, the mother I will never, ever have.

The loss of my father, not as much in his actual death, but the loss of the father he should have been, the man he should have been, the protector he should have been, the superhero he should have been to me and never was.

The loss of the family I no longer have. I didn’t just lose my parents when I ran away. I lost any connection to my brother. I lost the connection to anyone on my mother’s side of the family. I’m losing the connection to the very little family I have left, and I can’t change that.

The loss of my purpose. I believed so strongly that I was going to be a counselor some day. That is why I went through what I did. I was going to help people. I was going to right the wrongs that were done to me for so many years. But I lost that when my school showed me that my mental illness was all that mattered, not my skills or who I was on the inside.

The loss of self, the loss of my identity. Who am I? I still don’t know. I was never allowed to be anyone or anything other than what my mother told me to be. My identity is so fractured, both literally and figuratively. I’m not even sure that I lost myself, because I question whether or not I ever existed.

The loss of love, the loss of trust, the loss of ability to connect with people. I never experienced the love I should have gotten from the people who were supposed to love me but didn’t. I don’t know how to love because I never learned what love really is.

The loss of hope, strongly felt that April 25th night, when I sat alone, nearly dying, and my family didn’t care. The very little hope I had was shattered forever that night. I could have died, I should have died, and my family didn’t care. The loss of hope I continue to feel day in and day out as I realize the world wasn’t meant for me.

The loss of support, through 15 years of working with some of the shittiest therapists, the loss of support when I left everyone I knew behind so I could escape the hell that was my (former) home, the loss of support I feel when my therapist wants to send me away to the hospital, because even she can’t seem to help me.

I carry these losses in my heart every day. Now I have stones to carry with me, too. Because as much as I would like to throw the stones away, it’s not that easy.

I wish people could see these losses inside of me, and not just on these stones I carry.

We didn’t kill daddy

~ KJ ~ 3 Comments

I have been handling my father’s death quite well. I didn’t really grieve at all. I think the majority of my grieving was done long before my father died. I didn’t need any time off, I didn’t need to memorialize him in any way. He’s dead. Alright then. I’m going to go home and watch TV now.

With that being said, I tend to forget that I am not just me. I am many. While I am handling my father’s death just fine, younger parts are not handling it well at all.

Someone thinks the police are coming for us. Every noise, every knock, every police car we walk past on the way to work is the police coming after us. Why? Because a little one thinks that he killed daddy.

I have to stop and explain that we did not kill daddy, that daddy was sick for a long time and that’s why he’s gone. It’s not our fault he’s gone. We didn’t do anything wrong. The police aren’t coming after us. We are not bad. And I go through the same speech so many times and the paranoia is still there, the need to internalize blame is still there.

And then another part keeps asking to go the heaven to be with daddy. So then I try to explain that we can’t go to heaven because we are here on earth, and we have things to do here first. I really want to say that daddy is not in heaven, because daddy is a horrible person, but I have to remember that I am dealing with innocent younger parts whose beliefs don’t always align with mine. They don’t understand things on the level that I understand. They don’t really understand loss the way I have had to learn to understand it.

I’m already exhausted as it is, and this inner chaos just adds to it even more. I’m not good with people. I can barely handle myself, let alone a bunch of other parts. I can’t soothe myself, let alone soothe others. I don’t know what else I could say to them to help them understand what really happened. I don’t know how to keep it together for them when I can barely keep myself together.

How do I parent children when I have no idea how to parent?

Where do bad folks go when they die?

~ KJ ~ 7 Comments

I’m not a religious person.

My family was religiously diverse. My mother sent her children to Catholic school (though that was more for show than it was for instilling the values of Jesus). We went to Church for the tuition discount. My mother also used God to justify some of her abuse, which drove me away from religion entirely.

I identify as an atheist, probably more so an agnostic. I think all of those years of Catholic schooling have left imprints on my brain, because there are times when I think about God’s existence and Heaven and Hell and all of that in between.

I also constantly found myself the lone atheist among those around me. At work, most people were Catholic. In my undergrad, I had classes with many severe Christians – and when I say severe, I mean the extremely judgmental Christians that give the rest a bad name. I tended to keep my views to myself because I wasn’t one for religious debates. People can believe what they want to believe.

Whenever someone makes religious comments towards me, I normally let it go, be polite, and move on. But the other day, an acquaintance of mine reached out to me concerning the death of my father. She said that my father would look down on me and be proud.

I felt sick. The thought of a person like my father gaining entrance into Heaven disgusts me. I thought Heaven was supposed to be for the good and just? My father was not good or just. He may have mellowed out later in his life because he became ill, but that does not excuse the person he was before he got sick, and the life he ruined, the heart he shattered, the soul he took away.

If people like him go to Heaven, I would much rather go to Hell. Some sins cannot be forgiven.

Some sins should never be forgiven.

Freedom, Part 1

~ KJ ~ 6 Comments

On April 26th, 2015, I knew I was going to run away from home.

That weekend, I sneaked off to a retreat for my online support group. I knew I was going to be in trouble once I got back home, but something in me told me I needed to take the risk and go anyway.

It was at that retreat that I met my (now) therapists. On the last day of the retreat, I received a card from them, which I still carry with me every day.

You are so brave and courageous to come to this year’s retreat. You are deserving of a healthy, safe life. We are here to support you and believe in you. You are stronger than you believe.

Those words stuck with me, not only on that day, but throughout the following two and half months. As soon as I came home from the retreat, I started planning. I had my money spread across several bank accounts so I could hoard it without my mother finding out. I started selling things I didn’t really need (electronics, sneakers, books) online to make extra money.

I checked Craigslist every day looking for apartments and rooms for rent. I knew I needed to go where those therapists were – they were willing to help me, I just needed to get out. Several times, I thought my plans were not going to work out. No one wanted to rent to a person with no job in the area and no references.

Despite all of the ‘no’s, I kept looking. I knew this was something I could not give up on. I knew that I could not make it living there much longer. I put in my two weeks notice at work before I even secured a place to live. I told my family I was on vacation so they didn’t know I quit. I set up a fake post of my Facebook page that said I was accepted into an internship for school and that I would have to travel for a few weeks. I knew my family stalked my Facebook, so I made it public so my mother would see it. All of my friends were in on it, and posted supportive comments to make it appear legitimate. I had everything set but a place to live.

At the last minute, I found someone who was still willing to rent to me despite my situation. I sent the first month’s rent and security through a wire transfer because I couldn’t risk leaving my house anymore. That is how desperate I was.

Over the next few days, I was full of anxiety and doubt. I didn’t think I could do it. I was so scared to leave, and so scared to be somewhere new. I was also scared of how I was actually going to be able to get out safely. Very few people knew of my plans. My best friend, who was essentially my getaway driver, was the only person that knew exactly where I was going. I couldn’t risk telling people and tipping off my family. I had my online friends supporting me through the entire process, keeping me focused and helping me stay calm until the morning I finally did it.

On July 10th, 2015, before dawn, I woke up, cleaned myself up, got dressed, swallowed a few Xanax, grabbed my two sport bags of clothes, shoes and other essentials, and my computer, and I ran out the door. My father was there, waiting, as he heard me wake up early and wondered what was going on. He tried to question me but I did not want to get tied into anything, so I quickly told him I had an internship and went out the door.

That was the last time I would ever see or speak to my father again.

My friend was parked around the corner, in order to maintain his own safety in this unpredictable situation. I threw my bags in the back seat of his car and we drove away. My heart was beating so fast, my mind was racing, and I was nauseated. To add to the chaos, my friend had a flat tire. Not even 15 minutes into the trip, and we had to stop and find a shop to get the tire fixed.

As if I wasn’t anxious enough, I had to sit and wait for over an hour as they replaced his tire, watching the news on TV, continuously checking my phone to make sure none of them were trying to reach me. It seemed like forever, but we finally got back on the road and on the way to my new home.

Once we got into town, we stopped at a store so I could buy a few large items I couldn’t bring from home (a hamper, storage containers, bedding, hangers). With the car now packed with my only possessions, we drove to my new home. We were a few hours later than scheduled, but unscathed nonetheless.

July 10th, 2015, turned out to be the longest morning I’ve ever had. But it’s also the day I found my freedom.

Absence

~ KJ ~ 8 Comments

My father’s service was last night. I did not attend.

I know that, in many people’s eyes, that makes me a horrible daughter. I’ve already heard it. But that’s okay. I did what was best for me. I made a decision that was in my own best interests, for once in my life.

What would going to a service do? My father is already dead. I know that. I don’t need to go there to confirm it. I don’t need to go there and talk to people and pretend that he was a great person, when he was not at all what he should have been. Other people can attend and mourn for who they knew him to be. I mourned for who I knew him to be long ago.

I could not go and see my mother. There would have been no avoiding it. While I may not be scared of her in the moment, I have younger parts that are still terrified of her. Why would I expose them to that? Why would I expose myself to that? It wouldn’t be fair for any of us. It is too much of a risk.

And honestly, I don’t trust my mother at all. I can’t say with any amount of certainty that she would not try to hurt me. It doesn’t matter that she said she wouldn’t do anything. The fact that people even had to ask her that question says a lot. She is predictably unpredictable.

I’ve made too much progress to throw that all into jeopardy for a few hours of faked grief. I am not grieving. I am not mourning. I’m not sad that he’s gone. I am relieved.

My absence doesn’t make me a horrible daughter. My absence doesn’t make me a bad person. My absence proves that I have grown enough to realize that I have choices.

 

Wishes don’t come true (The loss of my father)

~ KJ ~ 12 Comments

Last Thursday, I told my therapist about how I kept seeing my father in random strangers.

It turned into talking about all of the things I wanted in a father, but never got. My therapist mentioned something about my wish for a real father, and I told her that my wishes never mattered, because wishes don’t come true. In that moment, I thought about all of the wishes I made that never came true: my wish to be dead, my childhood wish for someone to help me, my wish for decent parents, my wish for the pain to stop, my wishes for my parents to die. All wishes left ungranted.

Just 24 hours after that therapy session, I received word that my father was in the hospital, on life support, dying. My immediate reaction was guilt. All of those times I wished for his death, now he’s going to die. This was all my fault. I shouldn’t have wished for him to die. I shouldn’t have complained that my wishes never come true.

I didn’t know how to feel. Sadness, anger, relief, guilt, fear…they were all running through my head. 

My father had been sick for nearly a decade, but he seemed to go on forever. But this was it. His heart stopped and he wasn’t coming back from it. He passed away Monday night, July 4th, 2016.

When I found out he had passed away, I didn’t even cry. I just…went on with life. I went to sleep, woke up and went to work. I had moments of inner confusion, but I wasn’t heartbroken. I wasn’t distraught. I was okay.

Perhaps I prepared myself for his death in the days before. I went to therapy Monday morning knowing that my father would be gone in the next few days. But in talking about it in session, I didn’t even cry then. I cried more on Father’s Day than I did on the day he died.

That’s because I already lost my father, well before he died. I have been grieving his loss for awhile now. I grieved it when I ran away. I grieved it when I wrote him that card just a few weeks ago.

I can’t help but wonder about the timing of all of this. I have been muddling through so many emotions and such concerning my father, especially during the last month. My view of my father has changed considerably. I used to view him as a fellow victim of my mother, but I learned that he made his own choices, and those choices included hurting his children. My mother didn’t force him to do that. She didn’t force him to help her destroy me. He had the option to be a good parent and he chose not to.

If I hadn’t realized who my father really was in these last several weeks, I would be grieving a fantasy right now. I would be grieving a person that never existed. I would be grieving the person I hoped my father was.

At first, I was angry at myself. I didn’t have a chance to confront my father. I never got any closure. In reality, I know I would have never confronted him anyway. But at least while he was alive, it was always a possibility I could hold on to. Now I’ve lost that. That is what I grieve the most.

He’s not there

~ KJ ~ 2 Comments

Many times over the past few weeks, I’ve seen my father.

It’s not really him, of course. He doesn’t know where I am. But my mind seems to be playing tricks on me to make me think that it is him. I’ve seen him on the bus, at the mall, and on the street. Different men, each strikingly similar in appearance to my father.

It happened earlier today, as I was walking through the mall to get to the bus stop. I could have sworn I saw my father sitting in a chair in the middle of the mall. The man had the same hair cut and color as my father, the same weird slouch, the same sunglasses. I scurried past and continued to look over my shoulder, making sure he wasn’t following me. The man, a total stranger, but in my mind, he was my father.

Each time it happens, I go through a weird back-and-forth reaction process. I  panic on the inside. At first, I let myself get lost in the panic and let it simmer, leading to inner chaos and unsafe feelings. Now, I try to immediately reassure myself that it is not him, that we are safe here and no one can find us. It’s not a cure, that’s for sure, but it keeps me from totally withdrawing or dissociating out of fear.

On the other end of that fear, is the desire to run up to these men and ask them if they are my father. It is something I have (thankfully) not managed to give in to doing, but the want is still there.

It doesn’t make much sense to me, simultaneously fearing someone and wanting to approach them. I don’t understand where that impulse is coming from. It feels like a confused child’s way of reaching out to her father. And I am a rational, 30 year-old adult who does not want to speak to her father ever again. What a contradiction.

Is it paranoia? I don’t know. Maybe there are just a lot of men that look like my father. He’s not atypical in the least, so it’s not a stretch to say there are many other similar men out there. But why haven’t I noticed them before? Why is this happening now, all of a sudden? And why do my reactions have to be so complicated?